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Photo of the wine scene in Paso Robles, CA. This is Tablas Creek winery. Photo of Robert Haas (left) owner, and Neil Collins (right), the winemaker, in their vineyards.
photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Photo: Photo By Craig Lee

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Photo of the wine scene in Paso Robles, CA. This...

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Photo of the wine scene in Paso Robles, CA. This is Tablas Creek winery. Photo of owner, Robert Haas by their huge oak pungeons. photo by Craig Lee / The Chronicle MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/NO SALES-MAGS OUT

Haas co-owns Tablas Creek Vineyard in Paso Robles with the Perrin family of Chateau de Beaucastel, the respected Chateauneuf-du-Pape estate in France's Rhone Valley, whose wines Haas helped make famous in America.

Admittedly, Tablas Creek has been aided by its storied partners: the Perrins, whose name is synonymous with the Rhone's best wines, and Haas, one of the most respected American wine importers of the 20th century. Its wines have been consistently excellent, and the winery arguably has become the leading American source for quality clones of Rhone grapes. As a bonus, it helped put Paso Robles' wine industry on the map.

"He's not Robert Mondavi, but he may wind up being the Robert Mondavi of Paso Robles," says Gary Eberle, who planted one of California's first Syrah vineyards in Paso Robles during the late 1970s.

Tablas Creek never followed the rules. While most California wineries seek proximity to tourist magnets like Napa or Sonoma, Haas and his partners searched the state's more remote corners for a perfect site that would approximate the growing conditions of the southern Rhone. The 120-acre site they found in 1989 in the walnut tree-dotted western hills outside Paso Robles was hardly on the tourist route.

It was a given that they would build an estate vineyard, buying no outside fruit; even now, the winery makes just 18,000 cases a year. And the Perrins insisted on shipping their own vine cuttings from the fields at Beaucastel.

From the start, the densely planted vineyards were farmed using organic methods and were certified organic in 2003. Unlike most American wineries, Tablas Creek ferments its wines without commercial yeasts; rather than new small oak barrels, it relies on the same massive old oak casks (foudres) used at Beaucastel. Though a few varietal wines are now made, the main bottlings -- Cotes de Tablas and Esprit de Beaucastel -- are Chateauneuf-style blends. Both vines and wines are tended by the same British-born winemaker, Neil Collins, that Haas hired in 1997.

"It's been 12 years since I received the first one," says Collins one day as he takes delivery of two new $18,000 foudres, each taller than the average man.

That's not to say there aren't differences. Though Beaucastel's vineyards in France must by law be farmed without additional water, irrigation tubing can be seen among Tablas Creek's vines. Even so, a steeply sloped 12-acre plot is being experimentally dry-farmed.

While Haas could be forgiven for a well-earned sense of grandeur, both his modest demeanor and Tablas Creek's low-slung facility -- modest even in relation to its low-key Paso counterparts -- are a striking anomaly in an industry built on palatial edifices and palatial egos. And anyone seeking to reap riches from wine should consider this: Despite its famous founders, Tablas Creek lost money for its first 14 years.

In part, that's because Haas needed time to master two new skills -- running a vine nursery, and selling not someone else's wine, but his own.

"It turns out," he says, "we didn't know anything about the two businesses that were going to be key here."

Certainly, Robert Haas didn't come to the wine business unprepared. After graduating from Yale in 1950, the Brooklyn-born Haas worked for his father, Sidney, who owned M. Lehmann Inc., one of New York's most prestigious wine retailers. In July 1953, the store's wine buyer in France, Raymond Beaudoin, passed away. Haas' father drafted him to find a replacement.

Armed with basic college French, Haas met Beaudoin's assistant at Paris' Orly airport and they headed into the countryside. Along the route in the Cote de Beaune, Haas passed villages like Marsannay and Gevrey, names he knew only from wine labels. He inhaled the scent of vine trimmings burning.

"It was very romantic," Haas recalls. "At that point I pretty much decided that I was going to do the French buying."

As he polished his French, he tasted his way across France, adding wines to his portfolio like Chinon from the Loire. He traveled to Bordeaux, where he saw local negociants selling as-yet-unbottled wine. He liked the concept so much that in 1954, he sent a mailing to 3,000 Lehmann customers offering wine "futures" from the 1952 vintage. Despite Sidney's skepticism, Robert sold 3,000 cases in a month -- and set what has become the standard practice for buying Bordeaux in the United States. He became a major shipper of Lafite Rothschild and, from 1959 to 1973, was the exclusive importer for Chateau Petrus. His name was gaining recognition alongside well-known American importers like Frank Schoonmaker, with whom Haas shared an export office.

In 1955, Haas paid his first visit to the Napa Valley, driving in a convertible with Barney Rhodes, who would eventually own some of Napa's top vineyards. To Haas, Napa's rustic charms reminded him little of the wine country he knew. "I said, 'This doesn't look like vineyard to me.' " To be fair, there was hardly an East Coast market for California wine. French wines were still cheap; Haas sold Cos d'Estournel, the Bordeaux second growth, for $18.50 a case. (The 2004 costs around $900 a case.) "I think we sold a case of California wine per year," Haas says.

Back home, in 1961, Haas' father decided to sell his retail business to the floor manager at his biggest competitor, Sherry Wine and Spirits Co., who would later merge the two stores. He continued to distribute his son's wines, but in 1966, Sidney wanted out. Sidney sold his interest in East Coast wholesale and distribution companies to Barton Distilling Co. in Chicago. Robert stayed on to run Barton's wine division.

It was not a good match. Barton's business was bourbon, and its executives had little interest in wine. By 1970, Haas left, taking the brands he represented with him.

He briefly went back to retail, becoming a buyer for Sherry-Lehmann, the successor to his father's store. But he'd had enough of New York. So he and his second wife, Barbara, moved to Vermont. In 1973, he founded a new import firm, Vineyard Brands.

When Haas retired from Vineyard Brands in 2002, it was one of the nation's biggest importers, with annual sales of $60 million. (His son Daniel remains a senior vice president there.) Among the names in the portfolio Robert had built: Burgundy's Henri Gouges, Bordeaux's Chateau Larose Trintaudon, Domaine Weinbach from Alsace and Marques de Caceres, which would become perhaps the best known Rioja in America.

Haas' work in the late '60s did yield a few benefits. In 1967, he ventured to the ancient Rhone town of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and met a vintner named Jacques Perrin, whose family had acquired the Beaucastel property in 1909. Perrin already had three U.S. importers. It took three years for Haas to convince Perrin to let him import the wines as well.

But ties slowly formed between the two families. Vineyard Brands began importing the Perrins' negociant brand, La Vieille Ferme, in the mid-1970s, and later brought in their second label, Perrin & Fils. When Jacques Perrin died in 1978, his sons Jean-Pierre and Francois took over and Haas became the Perrins' exclusive importer.

Haas hadn't forgotten about California. During the '70s, he represented some of Napa's top names, and would bring Jean-Pierre Perrin along on trips to Freemark Abbey, Clos du Val and Joseph Phelps.

"Everyone was planting Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Merlot," recalls Jean-Pierre Perrin. "I said to Bob, the climate is more for Rhone varietals than Chardonnay."

By 1985, Haas began to think he should join the California boom. But California was just dipping its toe into Rhone varieties. Syrah had gained a modest foothold and spotty patches of Grenache could still be found, patches that went into field blends or were remnants from use in 1940s table wine. No one knew exactly where Rhone grapes would thrive.

The Perrins wanted into California wine too. They partnered with Haas and began a four-year hunt for the ideal site to replicate growing conditions back in Chateauneuf. The partners traveled from Nevada County in the north to Ventura County in the south. Jean-Pierre Perrin kept an eye out for olive trees -- a common sight in his native Provence, and a sign of similar climate -- and for chalky soils, a rarity in California.

One day, driving up Paso Robles' Peachy Canyon Road, they were astounded to see chalk cliffs rising on both sides. Bingo.

They bought a nearby plot of pastureland on rolling hills, about 12 miles inland from the ocean. The unusual calcium-rich, high-pH soils more or less mimicked Chateauneuf's terroir. Hot summer days and chilly nights provided similar ripening conditions, along with a later start to the wet season.

Meantime, Rhone-style American wines had started to sell, thanks to pioneers like Bonny Doon's Randall Grahm, Bob Lindquist in Santa Barbara County and Gary Eberle, who had staked a Rhone flag in Paso with one of the first commercial Syrah plantings in the late 1970s.

Even so, Paso Robles was barely on the map. A livestock and agricultural town, its few vintners focused largely on Bordeaux varieties. So when Haas and the Perrins showed up, no one knew what to make of the Frenchmen, their well-heeled East Coast partner, their quixotic plans or their remote hilltop site.

"It wouldn't have been my choice, but it was a very smart move," Eberle says.

No sooner had they bought the property in 1990 than it became clear: American grapevines wouldn't do. "We knew it right away," Haas says. "When we were looking around for property, we tasted the wines being made, and the wines were pretty weak."

It would be seven years before a wine was made under the Tablas Creek name. Imported vines must be held in quarantine, and because UC Davis didn't have a USDA representative at the time, Haas had to bring vines through an agricultural station in Geneva, N.Y. The first material wouldn't arrive in California until 1993. When it did, they began propagating it in a nursery that would eventually yield 200,000 vines per year.

Beaucastel always prided itself on using all of Chateauneuf's 13 approved grape varieties. The Perrins sent vines for grapes like Grenache, Mourvedre and Roussanne, and later for non-Rhone varieties like Vermentino. The goal was to provide enough vines for Tablas Creek's vineyard, but word quickly got around. Soon, everyone wanted a cutting or two of Tablas' clones -- vines that were genetically sourced directly back to Beaucastel. Demand became such that Haas eventually outsourced nursery operations to a Santa Rosa company, Novavine. Tablas Creek has provided so much vine material to other U.S. vineyards that some Rhone-loving winemakers now refer to it as "the mother ship."

Haas, who looks a good 10 years younger than his recent birthday would indicate, now divides time between California and his old home in Vermont. He is leveraging his knowledge of French wine appellations, and their market power, by lobbying for a proposal that would subdivide Paso Robles into 11 smaller parcels.

But he has had to work hard to sell his own wine. Rhone-style blends are still an anomaly among California wines, requiring explanation and personal salesmanship. Though he never intended to build a tasting room, it became a necessity. In the first few years, he had to go from one city to the next, explaining to buyers just what the winery was making and where it was located. Even now, he and his son Jason, Tablas Creek's general manager, spend thousands of miles on the road each year. But he has turned his interest to other parts of the business.

"I think the thing that intrigues me most is the farming," he says. "That's where everything starts and that's where the good wine comes from. If you're not farming well, you're not making good wines."